The local Washington DC news is reporting someone stole a mess of lottery tickets from a store. Would that work? Don’t the Authorities know the serial numbers of the missing tickets?
i was wondering it as well. tonight i noticed (as i picked up my teams powerball ticket) … that there is a bar code that gets scanned when you buy a scratch off. also a reciept thing printed in the lottery machine. i figure that is how they enter the system.
there is a video of 2 guys who dressed as ninjas who robbed a 7-11 type place. on thier way out they nabbed quite a bunch of scratch offs as well. they didn’t scan the bar codes.
I remember an article in a U.K. newspaper magazine saying that people had been convicted because they’d found stolen lottery tickets in their possession. They’d cross-referenced the ticket with the security tapes of the store that sold the ticket.
Speaking of stolen lottery tickets, if you win the lottery, is the ticket registered to you somehow, or is it only possession of it that shows you’re the winner? It would be awfully tense to win the lottery and then have a piece of paper worth ten million dollars in my hand.
I think most lottery tickets (and scratchoffs too, I think) have a spot on the back you can endorse, name, address, phone number, etc. I don’t know if it’s legally binding though, like a check.
The lottery computer knows exactly where it was purchased, but, certainly not who the individual is until he or she shows up to cash it. Good advice is to sign the ticket on the back if you are a winner.
A friend of my husband owns a gas station, and one of his employees stole $17,000 worth of lottery tickets while working. The employee and his girlfriend cashed in the winners at a convenience store, right around the corner, and were caught and arrested fairly quickly.
Still, $17,000? Wow. I believe it was a combination of print-out Lotto tickets, and scratch-offs, but I could be wrong. The guy plea-bargained down to 3 years in prison for embezzlement, but was originally looking at 25 years for fraud, embezzlement, grand larceny, and I don’t remember what else. He was caught because of video surveillance and the stringent lottery sales recording, so it didn’t go on for more than a few weeks.
There was this hotel in where I used to go on business. One of the janitorial staff won several million dollars. He put the ticket in his shirt pocket and sewed the pocket shut. He didn’t take off the shirt until after he got to the lottery office and turned in his ticket.
The gas station/convenience store DesertRoomie works at underwent a major renovation a couple weeks ago, shutting down the store for two weeks. Most of the stock – cigarettes especially – were parceled out to the other stores, but the scratcher lottery tickets went into the locked rental-container they parked out back. When it came time to move the equipment back into the store, about a third of them were missing. Why it wasn’t all of them is a mystery because the volume wasn’t that great and they were all in the same place.
Since which lot the tickets were was on record, and, more important, how many had been sold out of the packs, the rest of the tickets were voided by the lottery commission. The store never did hear if any of them had been already cashed.
I was once in a 7-11 parking lot and had the entertainment of the police questioning a guy who had stolen a bunch of lottery tickets from another 7-11 and then brought the winning ones to this 7-11 to cash them in. The guy told the cop that the first 7-11 clerk must have been the one who stole them.
There was a case in my hometown where the winner of a megamillion lottery was the cousin to a guy who bought the tickets for a group of hospital employees. The group took the issue to court, claiming it was their ticket that won and the guy turned it over to his cousin so he could get all the money. They lost because the cousin routinely bought tickets at the store that sold the winning ticket, and they had no proof that the employee actually bought the winning ticket. It did keep the winnings tied up in court for six months.